In the Waiting



When I was little, Easter Sunday was a favorite holiday because of candy and colored eggs and new dresses. When I got a little older, Good Friday became my favorite day of the Holy Week. Meditating on Jesus' sacrifice quieted the world around me and gave a different focus to suffering in general. 

Now, as an adult, it has become Holy Saturday...that day of bewilderment for Jesus' friends...that day that seems to reflect most accurately the world around me.

The quietness, the ordinariness of Saturday is perturbing, especially after a major loss. When you think of those men & women whose journey with Jesus had suddenly jerked to a stop with the unthinkable: a broken and dead body... Maybe they went together to mourn at first but eventually each found their own solitary brand of grief. Maybe they went to bed numb and confused, as we do in grief.

We know better though because we live post Resurrection. We know how the story ends, right? But we might really be in our own dark Saturday. 

Maybe you have found yourself wondering: Were we deluded by all the amazing things we heard about Jesus? Were we led astray by a magician? A myth? He said he was coming back but...where is he? What is he waiting for? Maybe he forgot? Maybe he changed his mind? Maybe he didn't mean it like that? Or maybe none of it was ever real.

This time of waiting, the stillness pregnant with tension of doubt and faith, is where we are, where they were. When the doubts and fears become louder than my faith and hope, I just remember that it is only Saturday. The story isn't over.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Carnival: Community

Image
Blog Carnival: Community Community is getting to be a buzzword that hardly seems recognizable.  It has become permanently connected with a metrosexual worship leader at the hip church which has an outreach into some impoverished place.  But is that community? Yesterday I wrote about Facebook's social networking site.  Did you know that there are more than 300 million active users and that 50% of their active users (returned to the site in the last 30 days) log on to Facebook in any given day and that the average user has 130 friends on the site? Is that community? Do we really have a community or do we talk so much about it and request friends by the busload because we desire it intensely? We were made for community.  Creator said it was not good for that first man to be alone.  Even Creator was not alone.  We need to walk with others.  We need our village.  We need them to not only walk with us a...
Read more

He's Calling

Image
I didn't sleep well last night. I kept waking up, wanting to write. Those nights are annoying, particularly when I am working 12 hours the next day so I have no business getting out of bed to write. But here is the thing that kept bugging me...what if God is calling us not to greatness, but to smallness? Yeah, weird thing to keep a person awake, huh? Our group that went to the Leadership Summit are praying for ways that we can put what we learned into practice. Look around your neighborhood-there is so much need. Look around your coworkers-enough need to depress you. Look around the world-so much need it can paralyze. And then I think about this thing with callings... What if it isn't about being called to a thing, but to be like Him? What if it doesn't matter where I am or what I do but how I do it? What if His only desire is for me to respond to this broken world as He does? Right where I am? Jesus stopped to love the kids, he held up important people to talk to a woman, ...
Read more

The Reason for the Season

Image
This post is participating in today's blog carnival on the word LOVE.  To read other posts, click here . As all my friends texted holiday wishes this Christmas, one stood out.  This one seemed to go against all the "Keep Christ in Christmas" and "Jesus is the reason for the season" bumper stickers.  This text said simply, U r the reason 4 the season. At first I thought she wrote it incorrectly, so I read it again looking for the typo.  But, there wasn't one. That's when it hit me: without me, there wouldn't be a need for Christmas. Ok, so that sounds somewhat egocentric, but hang in there with me.  God is this crazy amazing being made of love.  It is out of that crazy, amazing love that he chose to step into flesh, to show us that God does love us and that he didn't abandon us to the evil that surrounds us, to bring us back to this relationship.  God, the first and greatest lover, pursues us, rescues us.  O...
Read more